Search This Blog

Subscribe to this blog

Follow by Email

Typography Matters

A recent story on NPR about the importance of type font for a resume reminded me about the importance of typography for lawyers.

The NPR story notes that "[b]efore you even get your foot in the door of your next job, your resume can say a lot about you — starting with typeface.Using Times New Roman is the typeface equivalent of wearing sweatpants to an interview." The recommended font picks are Helvetica or Garamond.

Not only is typography and type font important for hiring purposes, it is also important for legal writing. Mathew Butterick's Typography for Lawyers is the quintessential guidebook for desktop publishing. Butterick also maintains a wonderful companion website that offers great tips on all things typography.

White space is your friend: The eye can tolerate only so much stuff on a page. In terms of increasing reading comprehension (and you want the judge to be able to easily understand what you're saying, right?), more white space is better. Butterick recommends line spacing of about 1.5, which puts a pleasant amount of space between lines while keeping enough information on the page. White space can also be used to divide documents into sections.

Be super consistent: If you underline cases cases and not italicize, make sure that you do that Every. Single. Time. You don't want to look careless with haphazard formatting.

This is a perfect example to show that taking time to really focus on the details will pay off in the end.

The current version of Standard 601(3)(a) was developed during the Comprehensive Review as a method of involving a law library in the process of strategic planning required of a law school. It was envisioned that the planning and assessment taking place for a law school (under what was then Standard 203) would incorporate the work done by the library under this new Standard. To ensure that incorporation, it was decided that a written assessment should be completed by the library. However, when the requirement for strategic planning for a law school was removed during a later phase of the Comprehensive Review, no change was made to the new Standard 601. As a result, the library community has been left…

Law libraries are in the information business. To act as superior guides to this information, we must also be in the people business. We must be concerned with the people who seek our information. And we must be concerned with the people who guide those seekers to the information (i.e., our staff).

Contrary to popular belief, it's not easy to be a staff person in the rigid hierarchy of an academic law library. Particularly at a time when law libraries are facing increased budget pressures that require staff to do much more with much less. This is especially challenging with longtime staff who have seen their jobs change dramatically since they were hired. Many of these folks were not formally trained in librarianship, and they may be resistant to the flexibility needed in today's law library.

Given these challenges, how do we motivate our staff to be the very best guides to our information?

To that end, there was an enlightening program at the AALL Annual Conference in 2013 t…

As we further consider how to train future lawyers for the Algorithmic Society and develop the quality of thinking, listening, relating, collaborating, and learning that will define smartness in this new age, law schools must reach beyond their storied walls.

In law, we must got beyond talking about algorithmic implications to actually help shape algorithmic performance. We need lawyers and programmers to work together to create a sound "machine learning corpus." There's potential for an entirely new subfield to emerge if given the right support. With many law school attached to major research universities, it's a great place to start this cross-pollination and interdisciplinary work.

This type of interdisciplinary work would help to satisfy the career aspirations of advanced-degree seekers but also the wishes of many college presidents, deans, and faculty members who see an interdisciplinary professional education as a path to greater relevance, higher enrollments,…